Saturday, June 17, 2017

François Houtart passed away on June 6th in Ecuador. He was 92 years old and had the revolutionary enthusiasm of a youth of 20. Our last encounter was in March 2017 when I gave a series of talks in Quito at the invitation of President Rafael Correa. François went with me the whole time. We went together to Pucahuaico, where the body of Monsignor Leônidas Proaño, an indigenous bishop identified with liberation theology, is buried. The chapel at the foot of the Imbabura volcano was full of native and working class people. Houtart presided at the Eucharistic celebration.

The next day, Rafael Correa offered us lunch. He had been François' student in Louvain, Belgium, where Houtart taught Sociology and Religious Studies for years to students from the periphery of the world, among whom were the Colombian Camilo Torres and Brazilian Pedro Ribeiro de Oliveira who told us:

"In 1975, I went back to Belgium to begin my doctorate. The first working meeting with Houtart, my adviser, dismantled everything I had prepared for the thesis on popular Catholicism. He said it was insufficient because it did not have a sociological explanation. To add to my astonishment, he added: 'As you should not be unaware of, only Marxist theory is really explanatory. The rest are merely descriptive.' I stumbled out of there, not understanding how a priest, who had been an expert at the Council [Vatican II], even collaborating in the writing of Gaudium et Spes, had become a Marxist without leaving the Church. Gradually I understood it: he was actively opposing the US war against Vietnam, and so he had discovered in the theory of class struggle a theoretical tool capable of elucidating what was at stake in that war, the anticolonialist movements of Africa and Asia, and the Latin American dictatorships. The best part is that he convinced me once and for all. The last time we participated together in a Sociology of Religion conference, we were the only sociologists to use Marxist tools to explain religious facts. I joked with him, asking him to take a long time to die, so I wouldn't be alone using Marx to understand religion ... "

François was tall, he had very clear eyes and smiled easily, even when expressing, at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005, pertinent criticisms of the Brazilian government in the presence of President Lula. A slow speaker, his scientific reasoning was didactic, since he had left Europe to live in Latin America and to devote himself to the social movements of countries of our continent, Africa and Asia. In 2016, he advised the national congress of the MST [the Landless Workers' Movement] in Brasilia.

We stayed together on several occasions when attending events in Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia. I always wondered how a man over 80 years of age found so much enthusiasm to travel around the world, often carrying a heavy suitcase with books of his, without ever complaining about lodging in a native tent high in the Andes, in an MST settlement in Brazil, or in a rice planters' hut in Vietnam.

In his years of study in Rome, François had as a colleague a young man named Karol Wojtyla. He told me that the Polish seminarian had an obsession with learning languages. He used the holidays to travel to the regions of Europe where he would learn a new language. On one occasion he accompanied Houtart to Belgium, interested in improving his French and learning Flemish.

One night, Wojtyla returned to the house in heavy rain. His Polish shoes had been ruined by the water. François found a Belgian seminarian who, as he wore the same size as the Pole, could give him a new pair. Decades later, now a priest, the donor of the shoes wanted to be received by Pope John Paul II. The bureaucracy alleged lack of time. When he sent a note to the pope, reminding him about the shoes, the doors of the Vatican opened.

In 2016, Houtart invited me to Ecuador for a seminar on Pope Francis' socio-environmental encyclical Laudato Si'. From the work together in those days came the publication, signed by both of us, Laudato Si - Cambio Climático y Sistema Económico ("Laudato Si': Climate Change and the Economic System" -- Quito, Centro de Publicaciones, Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, 2016).

During the trip we made last March to the Andean region of Ecuador, François told me about his participation at the age of 15 in the resistance against the Nazi occupation in Belgium. He and a friend decided to build a homemade bomb to derail a train of Hitler's soldiers. They were unsuccessful and the attack cost him a tug of his ears from his mother. He also told me that he had more than ten brothers and sisters. A decade ago, with everyone alive, they gathered to commemorate the 1,000 years of the sum of their ages.

During John Paul II's visit to Cuba in January 1998, Fidel invited Houtart to advise him, accompanied by Pedro Ribeiro de Oliveira, the Italian theologian Giulio Girardi, and myself. These were days of intense community work.

Worker training

In 2016, François sent me an interesting account about his formation, which I'm transcribing here in Spanish:

"During my seminary years in Malines (Belgium), I participated in numerous meetings of the JOC ["Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique" -- "Young Christian Workers"] in Wallonia and Brussels, during vacations. That's where I found out about the situation of the working class of that period (1944-1949). Just after the post-war period, Europe's reconstruction effort was accompanied by over-exploitation of labor, and the social conditions of young people were particularly scandalous."

"The regional and national JOC congresses provided information on the broader framework of the economic and social situation. In addition, I was able to visit different factories and coal mines. The Belgian JOC put me in touch with the movement in France, the Netherlands, England, Germany and Spain, and little by little the international dimension also became an important part of my introduction into the world of work."

"On many occasions, I met with Monsignor Cardijn (founder of the JOC) and was very impressed by his combativeness, his insistence on the incompatibility between social injustice and the Christian faith, and his knowledge of the lives of young workers. I also discovered the pedagogical method -- not starting from above imposing knowledge, but from below, discovering reality: seeing, judging, acting."

"This experience prompted me to ask, after my priestly ordination, to begin studies in Social and Political Sciences at the Catholic University of Louvain. I spent 3 years there, staying in permanent contact with the JOC, following certain sections, traveling through Europe for meetings with the movement. My undergraduate thesis was devoted to the study of the pastoral structures of Brussels, having discovered, on the one hand, their absence in the working class environment, and on the other, the identification of Christian religious culture with bourgeois culture, creating a divorce from the working class and, in particular, young people."

"During the last year of my studies in Louvain, I was the chaplain of the Young Workers Home in Brussels, a service of JOC for youth who had faced Juvenile Justice."

"On the European level, I had the most contacts in France, particularly in the Paris region -- St Denis and other suburbs. I became friends with some worker priests, and I even stayed in their homes."

"After getting a scholarship at the University of Chicago (1952-1953), to continue studying Urban Sociology and the Sociology of Religion, I lived in a parish where I worked as chaplain for JOC in the city. It was also the occasion of many meetings with JOC in the United States. During Easter vacation in 1953, I went to Havana to attend a JOC Congress of Central America and the Caribbean where Cardijn was present. I was able to have meetings with the local sections and meet with the national chaplain of Cuba. That put me onto the Latin American problem which I had wanted to know about for some time. After the congress I accompanied the JOC chaplain of Haiti to Port-au-Prince and I spent a week in the country in visits and meetings with the Haitian movement."

"Then I gave classes for a semester at the University of Montreal, and also participated in the activities of the movement. From there I moved again to Latin America and for 6 months I traveled to almost all the countries, from Mexico to Argentina, always with JOC, thanks to contacts made during the international congresses. It was a great learning experience, discovering the continent from below. Once more I discovered the chasms between the rich and the poor and the unbelievable exploitation of urban and rural young people. I was struck by the role of the priests attached to the movement in the renewal of a Church so alienated from the people and so close to the social elites and oligarchies. They were active in all fields: social, liturgical, pastoral, biblical. Many of those priests belonged to religious orders and quite a few of them had studied in Europe."

"That contact with Latin America was what made me begin, in 1958, a socio-religious study about the continent as a whole, with teams in each country, several times with members of JOC. It ended in 1962 and was published in some forty volumes, which led the Latin American Bishops' Conference to ask me for a synthesis in three languages to distribute at the entrance to the Second Vatican Council to all the bishops and to be with them as a peritus during the 4 years of conciliar work."

"Meanwhile Cardinal Cardijn had asked me if I would agree to be the international chaplain of the movement, which obviously interested me a lot, but my bishop, Cardinal Van Roey didn't approve this idea."

"Then, having worked in Asia during vacations at the University of Louvain, where I was teaching Sociology of Religion, I also got in touch with JOC in Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines. With my colleague, Geneviève Lemercinier, we took charge of a training seminar on social analysis for JOC activists in Hong Kong. In South Africa, in the middle of the apartheid era, I participated for 3 days in a national meeting with young white, black, and mixed race workers, which was prohibited in principle, in a convent of the Oblate Fathers in Bloemfontein."

"Everywhere in Latin America, Asia and Africa, I met in the following years with former members of JOC, both in trade unions and in development NGOs, or in progressive and also revolutionary political parties, like in Nicaragua or Bolivia."

"The lessons I've learned from JOC have been numerous and fundamental. First was knowledge of the working world, its struggles, its organizations. Then the method -- seeing, judging, acting -- which gives a very effective reflection framework for the analysis of realities and for the implementation of an action that is adapted to them. If I studied Sociology and if I continued the research work constantly, it was to refine the "seeing" in very different and complex societies. This also allowed me to discover that society could be read from above, but also from below, and that the Gospel option was to read the world with the eyes of the poor and oppressed. There is no neutral science, especially within the framework of the human sciences."

"The pedagogy of JOC and its adaptation to a specific environment of young workers, often hardly literate, has taught me to use simple language, to correctly structure the reasoning so that it is understood -- in a word, to get off the academic pedestal and also learn from those who have practical knowledge that is often despised by so-called 'wisdom'."

"Finally, it's also JOC that has led me to delve deeper into the social dimension of the Gospel, and to understand that what the Lord asks for is love in practice. It's not just about a personal attitude, but this love implies building a just society and following the example of Jesus in his society, where he proclaimed the values of the Kingdom of God -- love of neighbor, justice, equality, mercy, peace -- and fought all the oppressive economic, social, political and even religious powers. Not in vain did he die (executed) on the cross."(Quito, 01.03.16)

"Our dear François went as he lived, with total serenity, whole, lucid, diaphanous, on his feet...The night before, after an Act of Denunciation at IAEN (Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales) about the Tamil genocide, we ate supper as usual, the "soup" he liked so much, and for him it was vital to have it in communion in our mini-residence at nightfall and, as usual, he went off to sleep...Of course he kept working in his room...We don't know until what time...Because even at eleven at night we were still receiving his emails."

"At dawn, we guess he got up to go to the shower and his strength failed him...He had gotten out of bed, he had sat down in his recliner very near his bed, and with his hand on his heart he stayed sleeping in the deepest sleep of his life, very placidly, without making any noise, very quiet...A massive heart attack...At half past seven in the morning...he awoke in God."

"Precisely in April we had gone to the cardiologist, at my request, because he was feeling very agitated and like he was lacking oxygen...The cardiologist asked him to have surgery on his coronary artery because it had narrowed and the pacemaker was no longer responding as it had when it was put in four years ago. He said: François, the surgery is imminent...He chose to have it in Belgium at the suggestion of the cardiologist himself...But as much as he insisted, he didn't make the decision to travel right away: 'I have many commitments, I have to end the Houtart professorship in June and then I'll go," he told me. Again I told him it was a long time to wait...But he was the absolute master of his will and his decisions...He chose to finish everything he had planned here and travel to Belgium in June for his surgery which, as he would say sportingly, was a very small thing."

"With this, he had tickets bought and bags ready, to travel yesterday (June 9), but first to Bogotá, then a week in Cuba, then a week in Brazil and arrive at the end of June in his Belgium ..."

"I knew he chose freely to live with us, he felt happy, he was happy...and I think that deep in his heart he wanted to end his days right here."

"The final celebration took place -- at my request -- in IAEN, that Wednesday, exactly at five in the afternoon, the day and time he was to have ended his professorial program this year."

"We are desolate...We were happy with his jovial presence, full of friendship, fineness of spirit, delicacies and incredible details; but at the same time I know he was happy in our midst...He always said so and this fills me with joy and gratitude."

"Nonetheless we feel he is among us, he is alive, goes on, and will go on living and resurrected in the liberation struggles of all the impoverished all over the world, and in the birth pangs with which the INDIGENOUS PEOPLES and our Pachamama moan."

"As is noted in his will, we cremated him...and as soon as possible his ashes will rest with those of his mother in his native Belgium."

Miguel D’Escoto

Two days after Houtart left us, I lost another friend, also a priest and a revolutionary like him, Father Miguel D'Escoto, dead at 84 years. Minister of Foreign Relations of Sandinista Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, he presided the UN General Assembly in 2008 and 2009.

A diplomat's son, D'Escoto was born in Los Angeles in 1933. He became a priest through the Maryknoll order and was one of the founders of the New York publisher Orbis Books that in 1977 in the United States published my book Cartas da prisão under the title Against principalities and powers.

It was D'Escoto who received Lula and me in Managua on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in July 1979. He took us to the house of Sergio Ramirez, then vice-president of the country, the night of July 19, when we then met and talked at length with Fidel Castro.

In January 1980, he came to São Paulo in the company of Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua, to participate in the first world congress on Liberation Theology. He was one of the Sandinista Night speakers at TUCA, the theater of the Catholic University of São Paulo.

On Sunday November 29, 1981, in Managua, we met again in his house which belonged to the executive who presided over the Nicaraguan Central Bank at the time of the Somoza dictatorship. Daniel Ortega, the Secretary-General of the Sandinista National Liberation Front René Nuñez, Fathers Gustavo Gutiérrez, Pablo Richard, Fernando Cardenal, Uriel Molina, and the Social Welfare minister, Father Edgard Parrales, were there.

D'Escoto had just come back from Mexico and he described in detail the recent conversations about Central America between President López Portillo and General Alexander Haig, US Secretary of State. In the minds of the guests, an undisguised satisfaction at the efficiency of Sandinista espionage within the Mexican government.

We talked about the circumstances of the Church, the international campaign against the Revolution and the Sandinista Youth, now under the care of Fernando Cardenal. I was worried about the mechanistic nature of the Marxism that had spread among the Sandinista youth, mere apologetics from old Russian manuals. I stressed the importance of the priests in power -- D'Escoto, Parrales and the Cardenal brothers -- publicly explaining their life of faith. I feared they would project a more political than Christian image.

On Saturday November 16, 1984, in Managua, I returned to D'Escoto's house. I asked him why he hadn't gone to the OAS meeting in Brasília. "In order not to give credit to the OAS," he answered, "which continues to serve as a tool in the hands of the United States against the sovereignty of the people of Central America."

We celebrated the Eucharist under the wicker porch in the backyard. We read and meditated on the Gospel of Matthew 4:25 ff. D'Escoto blurted out: "My body and mind are tired, because they no longer follow the fast pace that circumstances impose on me. I dream of enjoying solitude, taking time for myself and not having to be always on the phone. However, I know that for the moment, this is just a dream. From my intimacy with Jesus, I take the strength that sustains me."

At the end of the celebration, he said to me: "I want two things from you: I am reading with great pleasure Dom Pedro Casaldáliga's latest book. I know he'll be going to Spain soon. Ask him to come through Nicaragua first. And ask Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns to come to Daniel [Ortega]'s inauguration next January 10th."

"Why don't you call Dom Paulo now?," I suggested.

We tried but the cardinal of São Paulo wasn't home.

Eleven days later I personally gave the message to Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns. The following year, Dom Pedro Casaldáliga visited Nicaragua.

In March 1986, I met him again in Havana with Rosario Murillo, current vice-president of Nicaragua and wife of Daniel Ortega, and Manuel Piñeiro, head of the Americas Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. We talked at length about the situation in Nicaragua and the explicit support bishops Obando and Vega were giving to Reagan's aggression policy. D'Escoto was of the opinion that the priests, religious, and laity should courageously confront the archbishop of Managua, leaving, if necessary, for ecclesiastical disobedience. The latter led to the suspension by Pope John Paul II of his priestly functions, a measure repealed by Pope Francis.

In January 1989, in Havana, we saw each other at the commemoration of the 30 years of the Cuban Revolution. He entertained himself in a long conversation with Leonardo Boff about the theology of the Trinity. "It is the basis of my spirituality," I heard him say. And he lamented the situation of his country: "The hardest thing for the people of Nicaragua isn't American aggression, but the lack of support from the Church."

We had other meetings later,such as during the period he presided the UN General Assembly, which led him to disbelieve entirely in the effectiveness of this important institution manipulated by the interests of the White House.

With the disappearance of François Houtart and Miguel D'Escoto, the cause of the poor and liberation theology have lost something in Latin America. They have left us a legacy of how to live the Christian faith in a world divided between a few billionaires and multitudes of destitute people, and what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in this troubled beginning of the twenty-first century.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

It isn't easy to imagine what a nun's life might be without thinking of the condition in a certain sense of exclusion in which it is mostly poured out. So when I first met Teresa Forcades and heard her speak not of God but of men and women, not of souls but of bodies, not about abstinence but about sexuality, I felt disconcerting wonder. It was as if an actually loving conscience were hiding in the cycle of religious words. Teresa Forcades is a Benedictine nun of Catalan origin. She is just over fifty years old and observes the rules of the cloister, with some room devoted to socializing. She is a doctor (she studied in the United States), a theologian (Ph.D. in Barcelona and Berlin), she is interested in psychoanalysis and feminism.

How did you move from medicine to theology?

"I would have willingly served as the medical officer in any small village in Catalonia, where there's greater contact with people. But when I finished university, I felt a need for recollection. For about a year, I retreated alone in a country house."

How did you spend the day?

"The hours were marked by a simple order: eating, sleeping, meditating. I had the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola with me. But I wasn't ready for a different life. I was young, still eager to deepen the study of medicine. I was preparing for admission to an American university. I was accepted and spent a certain time in a hospital in Buffalo. It seemed like a secure career but fate had other things in store."

What?

"I met Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a Roman Catholic theologian and feminist, naturalized American. She was the one who drew me to theology and feminism. But it was difficult to keep the hospital together with new interests. I had also applied to Harvard and the university had accepted my resume. I found myself in a complicated situation: I didn't want to give up my theology studies."

Did you have to choose between the Church and the University?

"More precisely between a final interview that would have then allowed me to get into the best hospitals or..."

Or?

"In that period -- it was 1995 -- I returned briefly to Spain, to the monastery of Montserrat. I was confused and restless. But that place felt familiar to me."

Was it a Benedictine monastery?

"For cloistered nuns. I spent a few weeks in prayer. One day, I was summoned by the abbess who told me she knew about my past as a doctor, especially as an infectious disease expert. She asked if I could explain to her and her sisters what the AIDS virus, which in those years claimed many victims, was. We organized the meeting on an afternoon during which I also wanted to talk about homosexuality and how in people's minds the wrong message was being passed that the illness was to be attributed to the sin of being gay."

How did the nuns react?

"To my great amazement, very well. There were many questions and the discussion continued during dinner. It seemed to me that I had found my world. The next day, I expressed to the abbess my intention to enter the convent. She started to laugh. She wasn't expecting it. I was convinced that I preferred Montserrat to Harvard. She tried to curb my enthusiasm. She advised me to go to Harvard and, if after the two-year scholarship, I still felt the "call," we would talk about it again. Time didn't affect that decision. In fact, I took the vows in 1997."

And how did your parents react?

"My father was incredulous, my mother very angry. Only my sister firmly supported the decision. As for my friends, almost everyone thought I was crazy. Leaving the prospect of Harvard for the convent was an inconceivable choice."

Is yours a bourgeois family?

No. My father was a salesman and my mother, a nurse. They separated when I was eleven years old. I was the first of three sisters. One day, my father, while accompanying us to school, told us that he had fallen in love with another woman."

How did you take it?

"I kept silent. It was a strange reaction. It seemed like a huge gesture to me but at the time I feared for him."

What year was it?

"It was 1977. The caudillo Franco had died a couple of years earlier, after a very long agony. Spain seemed like an immobile country. Isolated from everything. I remember that when I went to Paris in 1978 with my sisters and my mother, I felt a sense of freedom and was moved by everything I saw there."

Do you have any memory of the Franco dictatorship?

"As Catalans, my people were not in favor of the regime. In the family, the story of my two grandfathers circulated. The paternal one had fought for the Left. The maternal one was a doctor and during the civil war he was arrested by the Republicans. He didn't have Franquist sentiments, but the fact that he was one of the authorities in the country convinced the "reds" that grandfather was an enemy of the people and as such he was to be shot."

Was he executed?

"My grandmother wept and begged the commander. She handed over the family jewels and said she was expecting a child (she was pregnant with my mother) and that if the father were shot nobody could take care of their livelihood. This was to save his life."

How did you experience your role as a novice?

"At the beginning there was enthusiasm. Then the doubts began, accompanied by a feeling of oppression, boredom, a lack of perspective."

Were you realizing the difficulty of those vows?

"I felt the comfort of prayer and the simplicity of that world, governed by a harmonious silence. And yet I seemed to sink into despair. It was as if I didn't have the strength, the conviction, the tenaciousness to sustain that choice. I wondered if God would help me. I saw happy people around me and in contrast, I experienced a sense of deep uneasiness."

Did you know what was wrong?

"I didn't get any cultural stimulus around me. I had been around the world and discussed with the most open minds, learned languages. Suddenly I found myself in a kind of dead calm."

Did you doubt your vocation?

"I was in crisis. I had not yet taken the vows. It happened at that time that I fell in love with a young doctor. It was a test of my true feelings. I had to choose between God and the world. It was at that point that I felt the strong need to become a nun."

What does it mean to be called? I'm asking you because maybe in that "voice that's calling" there might be suggestion, misunderstanding, self-projection, with the use of weapons and murder.

"There can be all that; only time determines the degree of authenticity of that voice."

Don't you feel the weight of exclusion?

"On the contrary, I feel at the center of everything I do."
What do you mean by centrality?

"I don't mean domination or control of an environment. I'm thinking rather of radicalism without dogma. Every time you search for a center, you're looking for a void."

Doesn't it risk being an illusion?

"I imagine the center not as a principle of stability but of rupture."

Perhaps both are needed.

"Stability and rupture can also alternate. Like order and disorder. History teaches it. But I think my life is resting in an invisible center that can not be defined. And that's why I would call it a mystical experience."

I read in your Siamo tutti diversi! ("We Are All Diverse!", published by Castelvecchi) that you connect the experience of a void back to Lacan's thought.

"It might be surprising that a nun reads Lacan and draws any useful hint from his thought. I've been dealing with psychoanalysis and in particular the notion of the 'unconscious subject'. Freud argues that the inner authenticity of a person has been repressed."

That can thus be liberated?

"It's the role that psychoanalysis should play. We're talking about a modern ideal -- liberating man's strengths! From the moment he substituted himself for God, man has developed an infinite desire for himself. In theory, he thinks he can do everything."

And in parctice?

"Society, the State, the Church are the institutions that oppress him. So the subject finds that he has no authentic interiority. That's why Lacan says that interiority is a void and that this void can be represented as the subject's death."

Does the subject's death come after the death of God?

"There would not be that without this."

Yet we want to become authentic people.

"In the worldly horizon, our identity comes from outside -- like desires are, it is induced. In childhood, it comes from the relationship with the mother. We think that our authenticity results from this original relationship, but this isn't so. The mother passes away and we seek a new identity that we will find in something else or some other situation. This is what drives Lacan to say that there is no authenticity in us. We are only inhabited by a void."

Is desire also a form of void?

"The desire that takes place in the void is precisely what I call mysticism. But it's an undetermined desire."

Desire always arises as a form of absence.

"But it is almost always caused by what is missing from outside -- a pair of brand name pants, an elegant jacket, a custom-built car. I don't mean desire in that sense. Augustine went so far as to say that everyone desires God, but not everyone gives the same name to [that desire]."

What does it mean to desire God in the era of His death?

"For me it means defending the truth."

Everyone argues, religiously, that they want to defend it, even with the use of weapons and murder.

"That's not the truth; it's just fanaticism. On the other hand, truth can't be a relative concept, so each one has his own good truth ready to use."

So?

"The truth for me is all that it is not. But the point is that one must argue that "is not" every time."
Don't you feel privileged?

"In what sense?"

I'm thinking of the simplicity of your sisters, the fact that they don't own or use sophisticated instruments, that they don't deal with philosophy and homosexuality, that they respect the cloister.

"I'm very envious of the sisters who live in their cloister permanently. I wouldn't talk of privilege, but of a disposition to complete an action. As for the cloister, after the Council of Trent, the partial one was introduced. The monastery community decided on the dispensation, how to apply it and when to revoke it."

How is your life in the monastery?

"It's divided into equal proportions between work and prayer."What do you mean by work?

"I mainly engage in intellectual activity -- I translate, write articles, teach. This year my lesson is divided into two parts: the need of the soul, which is inspired by Simone Weil's book The Need for Roots, and feminist theology in history."

You've talked about "queer theology." What does that mean?

"Queer is a term that started to circulate in the nineties. It can mean 'crossing', 'passage', 'transition'. Then it took on the meaning of bizarre, strange, extravagant."

It has been brought back to the transgender universe.

"That's true and it's a possible variation. What I mean is dealing with a theology out of the pre-established schemes. Theology is not the conceptual defense of God's existence, which could create many misconceptions. No. It's a form of co-creation."

Meaning?

"I think God didn't just create the world and us in seven days. Co-creation means that we continue to do his work with other tools."

But we aren't perfect.

"Creating is also risk-taking. Without risk, says Weil, there is no freedom. God has created unique pieces. It is up to us to continue to be so."

For you, does that mean being a nun?

"It means that too."

You could be approaching heretical thinking.

"I have never been indoctrinated in conservative Christianity. Each passing day we should be willing to learn something new."

Don't you fear excommunication?

"I'm prepared, I don't fear it. Excommunication has been the worst thing of Catholicism. Equal to the Greeks' ostracism."

Are you happy?

"I am every time I go back to the monastery. Every time I do something that helps to change things. Augustine has said, 'God created us without us, but he did not will to save us without us.' Happiness is also this awareness of our being human for and with others."

So it is not surprising that there is a renewed interest in this 2014 documentary about liberation theology that Madrid born filmmaker Andrés Luque Pérez made for Spain's TV2.

Filmed mainly in Brazil, Peru, and El Salvador, the documentary provides an excellent introduction to the subject of liberation theology, including much historical footage such as John Paul II's public reprimand of Ernesto Cardenal and scenes from Archbishop Oscar Romero's death.

After a broad historical retrospective on liberation theology, the film moves to segments on the key sub-issues that theology addresses: the poor, the environment, landless peasants, indigenous populations, women, globalization. One can't help but wish the film had been made a little later when surely there would have been material on Pope Francis and an added segment on migrants and refugees.

The film features many of the great figures of liberation theology including Jon Sobrino, Leonardo Boff, Sergio Torres, Gustavo Gutierrez, Rafael de Sivate, Ignacio Ellacuria, Pedro Casaldáliga, Pablo López Blanco, Fray Betto, Leonardo Lego, and Juan José Tamayo. As one watches it, it's impossible not to feel nostalgic knowing that some like Ignacio Ellacuria are no longer among us, and others like Pedro Casaldáliga are still alive but too disabled by illness to participate in such a project today. One is thankful that Pérez has captured and compiled their testimony.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Vatican City (VR) - The Papal Almoner, Archbishop Konrad Krajewski, is the man entrusted by Pope Francis to express his charity towards the neediest.

Food distribution, the installation of a dormitory, showers, a barbershop and laundry near the Vatican are just some of the initiatives of this Polish man who was born in Lodz on November 25, 1963.

What few people know is that the prelate -- who has been serving in the Holy See for years -- has put his apartment at the disposal of migrants fleeing war areas. So for months he has been sleeping in his own office in the Vatican.

A gesture that's "natural and spontaneous, but there's nothing heroic in this," says Msgr. Krajewski, when surprise is shown at his choice. "The Gospel teaches us to help those in need, and the first need is housing," he reminds us.

The decision responds to Pope Francis' strong appeal during the September 6, 2015 Angelus that every parish, monastery and religious house would welcome at least one refugee from Syria or North Africa fleeing from war and hunger.

On returning from the Greek island of Lesbos, where he went to meet the refugees, Bergoglio brought three families, who were until just recently housed in Santa Ana Parish in the Vatican, and later in the Sant'Egidio Community.

The Archbishop welcomes groups of immigrants in his apartment -- inside the leonine walls, offering them hospitality until they can become independent and find a more permanent home.

"A few weeks ago," says Msgr. Krajewski, "other families arrived, and the lovely thing is that for the first time in my house, a beautiful little girl was born. And I confess, I feel a bit like a grandfather, an uncle. It is life that is continuing, a gift of God."(JE)